The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

  She entered her translation on to her laptop and then looked at the next letter. From Fatima Hanım to Kanat on 1 June 1953.

  My dear Kanat,

  Because of the heat, I must open a window at night, as I know you do too. I hear your tears and they break my heart. Dear brother, if you would only come and see me, I know that I could allay your fears and soothe your pain in an instant. Please come to me, my soul Kanat. I miss you as I would miss water in the desert.

  Your loving sister,

  Fatima

  Barçın was about to transcribe the letter when she noticed one single word written at the bottom of the page—

  ‘Mirra?’

  Oh God, it was Sergeant Mungun with yet more coffee. It was very kind of him, and she did like mirra very much. But every day, almost every hour, was a little excessive.

  She looked up and smiled. ‘Oh. Thank you,’ she said.

  He put the coffee down on her desk. ‘No problem.’

  He clearly wanted to talk, but she really didn’t. He obviously had an interest in her, which he had made more than plain, and she thought he was nice, but that was all.

  ‘Constable—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant Mungun,’ she said. ‘But I really don’t have time to talk at the moment.’

  ‘OK.’

  She saw the reflection of his slightly disappointed smile in her computer screen. It made her feel unkind, and she cringed. When he’d left, she breathed a sigh of relief. She’d only known him a few days, but already he was oppressing her. Why were so many men from the east so needy?

  She dutifully took a sip of mirra and then looked back at the letter. The word in pencil at the bottom was Die.

  Çetin İkmen had never been a great swimmer. He knew enough about the sport to be able to save his own life, but that was it. Swimming for pleasure, like football, was something he didn’t understand. Usually.

  But the late-afternoon heat was frying his brains and the Oriental Club’s deep blue swimming pool looked incredibly inviting. However, he also felt totally out of place among the fashion-model wives wearing golden bikinis the size of small handkerchiefs and looking down their carefully sculpted noses at him. Unlike him, they were not drinking Fanta but gin and tonic; like him, they were almost certainly secular. It was in places like this that İkmen just about managed to appreciate why so many people continued to vote for a political party that was religious in origin. Ordinary people could relate to religion, but this club was alien, even to him.

  ‘Inspector İkmen?’

  A very smart man wearing a light summer suit offered his hand. İkmen made to rise, but the man pressed him back into his seat.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘I’m Adnan Selçuk. I’m one of the club’s lawyers.’ He sat. ‘Can I get you another drink? Something to eat?’

  ‘Another Fanta would be good. And an ashtray, if of course you allow smoking . . .’

  ‘I smoke myself,’ Mr Selçuk said. He called over to one of the many waiters walking around the pool: ‘Ashtray here. And a Fanta.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ İkmen said.

  The ashtray arrived as soon as he’d spoken, and Adnan Selçuk offered him a cigarette. They were very fancy, black with a gold collar round the filter.

  ‘Black Sobranie,’ the lawyer explained. ‘Always stock up when I go through the airport. Now, Inspector, I understand from Erdal Bey at Kenter and Kenter that the club is named as beneficiary in the will of a murder victim.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Fatima Rudolfoğlu.’

  Mr Selçuk leaned back in his chair and smoked for a moment before speaking. ‘I saw something about your investigation when the bodies were discovered. Tragic. I didn’t know there was any connection between the club and that family until our membership secretary Burak Bey told me.’

  ‘Rudolf Paşa was one of the original members,’ İkmen said.

  The club had been founded, in part, by foreigners. Diplomats from England, Germany and Russia, members of old Levantine families, and Ottoman soldiers and intellectuals. It was said that the first revolution against the Ottoman Empire had been plotted inside the walls of the old club when it was on İstiklal Caddesi over in Beyoğlu.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Selçuk said.

  ‘You know that Rudolf Paşa had a certain reputation?’

  ‘Ah, I believe so. The story of the final days of the Ottoman Empire is crammed with outré and very strange people.’

  ‘Rudolf Paşa practised magic,’ İkmen said. ‘Not, we believe, for benign purposes either, hence his reputation as a friend of the Devil.’

  ‘Mmm. Unfortunate.’

  ‘Indeed. However, that is no reflection on your organisation.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But given the fact that Miss Rudolfoğlu and her brothers have all died in suspicious circumstances, we have to look at anyone who might benefit from a bequest. The house is in a terrible condition, but even a casual glance at local property prices in the area leads me to believe it has to be worth in excess of five million euros. It’s a historic house in a very convenient and affluent neighbourhood.’

  ‘Absolutely. We are both grateful and thrilled, if a little apprehensive about our good fortune,’ Mr Selçuk said. ‘To inherit a place called the Devil’s House is somewhat odd. But . . . I suppose you want to know how much we knew about this bequest, don’t you, Inspector?’

  ‘I’ll need to see any relevant legal documentation, yes.’

  ‘That won’t be a problem. We’ve already located the file, although I have to say that all of this was unknown to most people here until today.’

  ‘Most people?’

  ‘A couple of our older members claim to have known about some sort of arrangement with the Rudolfoğlus’ lawyers, although they never knew any specifics.’

  ‘Well according to Erdal Bey, the documentation is clear. Basically the club inherits provided Fatima Hanım and all her brothers are dead. And as you must know, the entire family died at the same time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is not normal or natural, and so we must investigate. Sadly for you, this will mean that you won’t get your inheritance for quite some time.’

  Mr Selçuk smiled. ‘I’m sure we’ll manage.’

  ‘I’m sure you will too,’ İkmen said. ‘In the meantime, I’ll need to speak to these older members who have some memory of the bequest.’

  ‘Of course. Let me see if I can find them for you.’

  Chapter 11

  If he just walked into police headquarters and told them who he was, they’d ask him how he’d known they wanted to find him. He’d seen nothing in the press or online, but obviously they were looking because they’d been to see Father Anatoli. The priest had admitted he knew him, and even told them that he lived in Beşiktaş. What he hadn’t said was that Mustafa Kaiserli still did go to church in Moda. There he could, just briefly, be Yiannis Apion, just like when Ceyda occasionally went to the Ahrida Synagogue in Balat and played at being Rebekah for a while.

  Father Anatoli hadn’t made any sort of effort to hide him.

  ‘Why should I?’ he’d told him on the phone. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?’

  ‘No, Father,’ he’d said.

  So should he now tell the police that the priest had called him after their visit, or should he just wait for them to turn up at his door? Because they would, and that was fine. And so he decided to leave things as they were. Father Anatoli had denied the police his contact details, which could annoy them. It was best just to keep quiet.

  Mustafa Kaiserli crossed himself at the threshold to the ayazma of St Katherine and felt himself relax into Yiannis Apion.

  His grandfather Kevork Paşa had been the first member of the Sarkissian family to live in the Peacock Yalı. The construction had been ordered by Kevork’s father, Garbis Paşa, who had died just before its completion. The peacock-tail motif that decorated both the inside and outside of the building had been a nod to the fa
r south-eastern origins of the Sarkissian family. In the Armenian quarter of the largely Christian town of Midyat, white peacocks were still common.

  Arto Sarkissian climbed wearily to the top of his house and unlocked a door. From the window on the landing of the fifth floor he could easily see the construction work that was proceeding at such an insane pace on the land next to his property. Another metal-and-glass monstrosity. He pushed the infrequently unlocked door open and walked into a room stacked with furniture and crates.

  Like his father Vahan, his grandfather Kevork hadn’t lived very long. He’d died when Arto had been a small child, and so all he knew of him came from distant memories of tales told by his father, and a few photographs.

  He’d been a court doctor, then a military doctor, then, when the Armenian elite lost its place at the top of society, he’d worked for just about anyone for a price. Arto knew he shouldn’t be surprised that Kevork Paşa had worked for the Rudolfoğlus. Maybe Perihan Rudolfoğlu had remembered him from his days at Yıldız Palace?

  The room wasn’t big, but it was full, not just of his grandfather’s possessions but his father’s stuff too. From on top of a battered suitcase a portrait of Arto’s mother Mimi looked sternly down. Were she still alive, she’d know exactly where to look. Mimi had known everything. Arto avoided her gaze and opened the top drawer of a large oak chest. He looked inside and shook his head. Black-and-white photographs. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, all flung in in no order whatsoever. Unable to resist, he picked up a handful and looked at himself aged twelve with his father in the garden. Even then he’d been fat. The next photograph was of himself and Çetin İkmen on the beach at Ataköy, out near the airport. Again he looked as if he’d just swallowed a football, while Çetin was so thin he could have been a famine victim. He threw the photographs back in the drawer and closed it. It was going to be a long night.

  Three women had offered to fuck him for money before he’d even arrived at the end of the street where the older members of the Dum clan lived. That was Tarlabaşı. What was slightly more unusual was to see an elderly man sitting in a large chair in the middle of the road. Luckily Gonca had warned him this might happen. Hasan Dum’s father, Irfan, was receiving condolences and gifts of food and drink from the people of Tarlabaşı. Normally the body of the dead person would be in the house ready to be viewed by friends and relatives. But Hasan Dum’s body had still to go through a full post-mortem investigation, and so the main protagonist was absent.

  Inspector Cıngı had already interviewed the dead man’s relatives, who said that they knew of no one who had anything against their wonderful father, son and husband. Dead gangsters were always perfect, in Süleyman’s experience. Of course his car had already been noticed by people in the area, which was why he was keeping his distance. The Dums knew him even if he didn’t know them. But he wanted to see who came to pay their respects. He’d already noticed a Kurdish fence of his acquaintance.

  He lit a cigarette and wondered how people got from the sight of a body lying, effectively, in state to the notion of that person’s relatives eating him. Even someone like him, a casual Muslim at best, found the idea of an unburied body unpleasant, but he knew that Christians and gypsies liked to view their dead. It was strange, but it had never occurred to him that they might be consuming them. Were people in Zonguldak really so ignorant?

  There were a lot of women lining up to kiss the old man’s hands. Many of them carried trays of food, probably helva, which was a traditional mourning gift. The men brought bottles of rakı. Gonca had told him that the actual funeral would be a noisy affair. There’d be lots of weeping, and men would fire rounds from pistols and rifles into the air – if they were lucky. If they weren’t lucky, at least one person would get shot by mistake, and then the whole party would decamp to a local hospital, where the victim would probably die. Then there’d be another funeral.

  What he hadn’t been expecting was gun play before the funeral. But he heard two distinct shots, and then he heard screaming. Mehmet Süleyman got out of his car and took his own gun out of its holster.

  ‘There.’ Barçın Demirtaş pointed to a very faint scrawl on the bottom of the page. ‘It says “Die”,’ she said.

  ‘How unpleasant,’ Çetin İkmen mused. ‘And you think this letter from Miss Fatima to her brother Kanat was given back to her with that word written on it?’

  ‘I do. It was found in her effects,’ she said. ‘The animosity between these people is enormous. A letter from Kemal to Kanat is all about how hurt he is that his brother thinks he’s like his father. Kemal claims that he is trying to put things right between them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It seems via sorcery,’ she said. ‘That’s what people believed about their father, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That he was in league with the Devil.’ İkmen shook his head. ‘If I remember correctly, Miss Fatima was conciliatory.’

  ‘Yes. But only Yücel is in any way sympathetic to this. I get the feeling he wants to . . . not make up with her, but find a way to bring them all together again somehow. But Kemal and Kanat are absolutely set against their sister and I don’t know why. Whatever it was had to be serious. There’s real hatred in these letters, and I’ve not done much more than scratch the surface. Also, sir,’ she said, ‘I get the distinct impression that we’re never going to find out from the letters what this issue is. Every time I read one and think I may be close, the narrative disappears into obscurity or elaborate Ottoman modes of expression.’

  ‘Mmm.’ İkmen opened his office window and lit a cigarette. He offered one to Barçın, but she declined. ‘In my career I’ve investigated a few crimes that have their roots in the distant past,’ he said. ‘They’re not impossible to solve, as I have proved, but they are problematic. Fatima Rudolfoğlu bequeathed all her money and property to the Oriental Club in the event of the deaths of herself and her brothers. Only men so old they can barely articulate their own names remember this now. I know; I met them this afternoon at the club’s stunning place over in Kadıköy. Rudolf Paşa was a member, but none of his children joined. Why would Fatima leave such a considerable sum of money to an institution she is not connected with?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. The club hasn’t been referred to so far.’

  ‘I’d say that maybe she was a daddy’s girl. She did what she did for her father, but we have no evidence of this, do we?’

  ‘Not so far,’ Barçın said. ‘Kemal is horrified to be compared by Kanat to his father. I’ve not found anything about her parents in Fatima’s writing. What was their father supposed to have actually done, sir?’

  ‘Ah, now there’s a thing,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ve not been able to track down anything you’d call concrete proof. There are rumours about consorting with the Devil, about violence. I even have it from one particularly strange source that Rudolf Paşa practised alchemy for the purpose of creating gold from base metal, and further, that he used human sacrifice to achieve this.’

  ‘So where’s all the gold?’

  ‘You may well ask,’ İkmen said. ‘But what it seems to all boil down to is that he was a bit of a bastard to those who worked for him. And who wasn’t in those days? That said, however, I did discover while I was at the club that my unreliable contact’s grandfather did indeed put on a magic show for the members, including Rudolf Paşa, just like he said.’

  ‘Your source is a stage magician?’

  ‘Yes. Sami Nasi. Calls himself Professor Vanek for reasons I won’t bother you with. But I know for a fact that his grandfather was a magician, that he knew Rudolfoğlu and that he played the club. Whether, as Sami told me, Rudolfoğlu actually asked his grandfather to help him with his alchemical work, I don’t know. Sami also claims to know how Perihan Hanım died, but until I get some verification on that, I’m not going to go there, for the time being.’

  ‘Rudolf Paşa doesn’t sound like a nice man,’ Barçın said.

  ‘Oh, there’s no doubt about that.
But did he, as Sami claims, actually sacrifice someone to the Devil, and if so, how does that have any bearing on the deaths of his children? Because if it doesn’t, then all this research is useless to us.’

  ‘You mean if the house was just broken into?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s likely.’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘But what if the past is irrelevant anyway? What if they were killed by someone who was in dispute with them recently? Like Yücel and Fatima’s carers?’

  ‘Not impossible,’ İkmen said, ‘but they both have alibis, and I don’t mean their own partners or children.’

  Barçın sighed. ‘I’ll just have to carry on then, won’t I, sir?’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘I wish I could help you, truly, but I am far too ignorant.’

  ‘Oh you’re not ignorant, sir,’ she said. ‘God, you treat me so well here! And to work with my actual brain for once . . . I just can’t believe my luck.’

  In spite of being a nominal Christian, Arto Sarkissian was not a great believer in miracles. Every year on the night of 14 September, one person was always ‘cured’ of something up at the Armenian Church of the Holy Archangels in Balat. But were they? Really? Arto would never venture an opinion. So it came as some surprise to him that just beyond midnight, he began praying to a deity he barely acknowledged to help him find Perihan Rudolfoglu’s medical records.

  He wanted to help Çetin İkmen, but the chances of finding anything about his grandfather’s patients in all that clutter were slight. Also, he’d realised that even if he did find anything written down, it was likely to be in Ottoman, which he couldn’t read. It meant he couldn’t even identify anything relevant.

  If he was going to get any sleep at all before the pneumatic drills and earth-movers started up again in the morning, he’d have to go to bed. Not that he felt he’d be able to actually sleep. But to his surprise, he did. And it was in that sleep that he remembered something, or rather, someone.